Ann Stephen

In 1960 at the age of 21, Ian Burn left the Victorian regional city of Geelong to become an artist. Like other young painters in the 1960s, Burn was drawn to London where, in the rich confusion of cosmopolitan Europe, he began to think about the role that language plays in art. By 1967 he was working at the explosive core of early Conceptual art in New York, where he was described as "the only Australian ever to be central to an internationality significant art movement." Burn's origins as an Australian landscape painter always made him an uneasy participant in the New York art world. After a decade of intense collaboration and politics, he eventually quit the metropolis to return to Australia. For more than a decade he juggled work in the local labor movement with writing, before returning to making art. In this the first biography on Ian Burn, art historian Ann Stephen traces his extraordinary body of work from the intimate viewpoint of friend and occasional collaborator. Her account is no conventional monograph, as Stephen approaches and presents Burn's work through a series of imaginary and real "dialogs" with other artists, inspired by his own collaborations and anecdotes. Through these encounters she reveals Burn's concerns with marginal art and the relations between amateur and professional, the politics of place and distance, deskilling, and the concept of originality. With more than 160 images, On Looking at Looking: The art and politics of Ian Burn explores his unique contribution to Australian art as an artist, writer, and curator. Stephen convincingly shows how Burn's work is alive to the most pressing questions facing art and culture today.

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